July 14, 2016

THE SHEPHERD'S LIFE:

A
Tale of the Lake District

by
James Rebanks

293
pages, Allen Lane

Review
by Pat Black

James
Rebanks is a shepherd in the Lake District, that place of wild fells and still
waters in the north-west of England you’ll know from Beatrix Potter and William
Wordsworth - or better yet, Withnail
& I.

Our
paths must have crossed. I go to the Lakes at least twice a year, clodding
around the hillsides in my Frankenstein boots, moaning about my wife’s
shortcuts having led us into swamps, perspiring heavily, and dreaming of scotch
eggs and foamy ales. On our travels, we see lots of Herdwick sheep - stoic,
unimpressed creatures with white faces and bluey-black fleeces - and say hello
to the guys and dogs looking after them. We’ve been to so many different parts
of the Lakes over the years - many of which are namechecked in this book - that
it seems we must have bumped into Rebanks and his flock at some point.

The Shepherd’s Life
is a memoir, charting the author’s growth from a punky kid in a tough school to
working on the farm alongside his father and grandfather, and finally
succeeding them as the head of the ancient family business. Shepherding on the
common grazing land of the fells is in Rebanks’ blood.

The
book doesn’t flow chronologically, tending to leap around from past to present
and back again, but it does follow the basic structure of the seasons –
beginning in summer, ending in spring. Rebanks delights in the nitty gritty of
looking after his flock. The split hands and dirt, the maggot ointment, being
soaked to the skin as a matter of course, digging lambs out of deep snow, the
sheer exhaustion. It’s hard work, but it’s all Rebanks ever wanted to do, a way
of life that seems as natural as breathing.

The
book is a counterpoint to the Lake District literature you know well enough – a
place of sublime commune with nature, or poetic whimsy with anthropomorphic
animals. Rebanks’ prose is hard-headed and unadorned, and there’s a part of him
which seems to resent the romanticism and poetry. He has open contempt for the
well-meaning but inexperienced middle class teachers of his youth with their
heads full of the Romantic poets, who knew nothing of the real, hard life to be
had working on the fells. It comes across as a bit chippy, though.

This
got the old spider senses tingling. If you don’t like the poetry and the
lyricism of it, then why are you writing a book? I wondered.

It
takes a while for Rebanks to reveal that he had something of a sabbatical from
his horny-handed toil in his early twenties, well after his formal schooling
ended with no qualifications to speak of.
Encouraged by his mother’s love of literature, he read as voraciously as
the blowfly larvae bothering his flock’s backsides. We travel from the moment a
friend takes him aside after he blows the opposition away at a pub quiz, and
asks why Rebanks doesn’t use that brain of his, to starting his first term at
Oxford University. It’s a jarring match-cut.

Rebanks
feels guilty about having to leave his father and grandfather to get on with
the job of looking after the sheep during term-time, but to his credit he feels
no sense of division. University and working on the farm are both things which
must be done. Rebanks gains his degree and has digs in Oxford, but returns home
on any time off at all to see the woman who will become his wife, as well as
mucking in at the farm.

Once
it’s all over, he’s back home in the family groove. You wonder what the point
of it all was.

There’s
one part that I found really intriguing, where Rebanks begins work as a
sub-editor on a London magazine. He’s a couple of years older than me, but going
by the timescales involved he might well have been schlepping around the
capital, cutting and rewriting, around about the same time I was, in the late
1990s or early noughties. So much is missing, but I am again inclined to wonder
if our paths ever crossed in this anti-rural setting.

It’s
incongruous to the rest of the book, and I wonder if this stint marked a period
where Rebanks tried to break away from his family destiny, consciously or
unconsciously. The author makes much of his sense of duty and tradition, of the
pride he takes in following in his forefathers’ footsteps. He even plays up
what he refers to himself as a classic drama – his grandfather as a benign
patriarch, his father as the man who takes on the mantle, and Rebanks as his
eventual usurper. When Rebanks has a son, the cycle begins again – although,
perhaps a sign of the changing times, Rebanks’ pride is obvious when his two
daughters throw themselves into the work of the farm.

There
is great tension on the farm between fathers and sons – isn’t there always? –
and Rebanks and his old man have to be stopped from knocking lumps out of each
other on more than one occasion. Maybe he sought to escape, to find something
different, even just to try it out? Perhaps it was just a passing whim. The
crooked paths a young man sometimes follows before he realises his true calling
in life.

I
don’t really believe that stuff. But the quasi-mystical language is so easy to
get into. Just rolls off the keyboard. I wonder what Rebanks will think if his
own children should follow the same instinct to fly the nest, a few years from
now?

There’s
a fair bit of history, and Beatrix Potter, the great Lakeland benefactor, is
lavished with praise. There’s also lots of detail about the sheep-farming
community, the solidarity and mutual assistance, and even the friendly rivalry
when it comes to showing off prize tups and ewes at the local fairs. But most
impressive is the clear, precise details of the hard work involved in breeding
and looking after a flock, from choosing the right sheepdog to the slime and
giblets of lambing in the springtime. You’ve got to reach in, find the
knuckles, and heave!

Rebanks
might narrow his eyes whenever my head bobs past above a dry stone wall. He
accepts that tourism brings a fortune into the Lakes, but it’s also helped to
spoil the place a bit. There is a touch of we-don’t-loike-ye-strangers-round-these-‘ere-parts
about this stance. Rebanks and his forefathers all wonder: why the hell would anyone
want to pay to come here to climb a bloody hill? In time, Rebanks comes to
recognise the importance of tourism to the area, and also understands precisely
why city-lubbers like me are absolutely desperate to find some peace and open
green space on the fells. But I also get the bloody-mindedness, the suspicion
of outsiders and the threat some speculators might represent to a bone-deep way
of life which people would defend to the death.

I
also have sympathy with Rebanks’ annoyance over the houses which stand empty
outside peak tourism times. I usually go to the Lakes in late February, and
this is something that occasionally creeps me out. If you go to a holiday
cottage or a row of terraced houses let out for this purpose out-of-season, sometimes
you can be the only person there. That makes any noise outside your house in
the pitch dark in the middle of the countryside well worth investigating. God
knows how many thrillers/horror stories I’ve concocted in those odd middle-of-the-night
moments. But in a country where thousands of people live on the streets,
there’s something obscene about luxury houses simply lying empty all over the
country’s beauty spots. But that’s for another time, and another place.

Rebanks’
book was a surprise success, and enjoys a prominent place as part of this
century’s golden age of nature writing. We return to the question: is this
explosion in the popularity of pastoral concerns down to the collapse of the
certainties of capitalism, or simple boredom with urban life and its ridiculous
pressures and pastimes? A quick look at recent news headlines from the UK alone
might help answer this.

To
a shepherd, any other way of life must seem like insanity. And no wonder. Even
if the City of London should come crashing down, James Rebanks will continue to
do what he’s always done, and will probably come out of it just fine.